


The Sacred and Profane

by ncfan



Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Adult Themes, Backstory, Blood and Gore, Creating a child with the express intent of killing her later, Gen, Misanthropy, Past Fic, Psychological Trauma, Self-Harm, Trauma, disturbing imagery, so someone else can go around wearing her corpse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-31
Updated: 2019-12-31
Packaged: 2021-02-27 03:29:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,416
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22060351
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ncfan/pseuds/ncfan
Summary: As regards to children, Seiros had precious little experience. She had been the youngest of Sothis's children; there were none who came after her. It was fortunate, then, that this was not to be her child.
Comments: 9
Kudos: 28





	The Sacred and Profane

**Author's Note:**

> [ **CN/TW** : Misanthropy, trauma, self-harm, blood, gore, death]

As regards to children, Seiros had precious little experience. Zanado had been a place with no children in it by the time she was grown; none had come after her, and those who had grown to maturity alongside her, she had been too young to really pay attention to the aspects of their upbringing, or the finer workings of their maturation. And who would have expected Seiros to be keeping a log of her own maturation, anyhow?

To gain experience of children, enough to call herself an expert, Seiros would have had to turn her attention to the humans, and her hands were not made for cosseting humans, not even their young. They must first prove themselves to her, and a child could prove nothing. A child could become anything, once grown. That did not imbue Seiros with anything resembling optimism.

(She woke too often with the phantom taste of blood in her mouth. Nemesis’s bloodline was _gone_ , effaced utterly from the face of this world. Seiros had made certain of that. And yet, she woke often with blood in her mouth, or some ghost of it; try as she might, she could never find any stain on her pillow. She remembered. It was beyond her power ever to forget. She knew what they were, when they had no strong hand to guide them down the correct path. Never would Seiros place her faith in a human child, when their true nature had yet to reveal itself.)

Seiros had little experience of children. It was fortunate, she thought, as she descended into the dark, clammy embrace of the crypt, that this was not to be her child.

-0-0-0-

So great were the holes in the fabric of her world that Seiros had no illusion about her ability to pull it around herself like a cloak. (They saw the saint. How quickly they forgot the spirit of desolation.) She could not enter this new age surrounded by family, not when she could count on one hand the number of family left to her. She was no fool; she knew that. She had a broken, bleeding canyon, a crypt filled to bursting with bones and Crest stones, three living brothers, and one living niece. A few shards of the life she’d once had remained to her, and all they could do was cut.

Seiros had not expected to be left completely alone.

Macuil taking his leave had come as no shock. He held the humans in about as great an esteem as did his sister, and cared nothing for the welfare of a world that had so mutilated their own. He left, and Seiros could only watch, and wish, for one moment, that she did not care as much as she did about preserving Mother’s legacy.

(There were other things to be considered.

 _“How dare they parade the bones of our dead as their trophies?! How dare_ you _allow it?!”_

How dare she? Yes, that was a question Seiros sometimes liked to ask herself. Blood and bone and power, the idea of letting them go _on_ reducing her kin to such made her blood boil. It was a wonderful way to wind up tasting blood in her mouth in the fully waking world, from just how much she had to bite her tongue when she saw one of the thieves waving a brother or sister’s bones around as if it was _nothing_.

The humans were many, and she and hers were few. It had been necessary to make allies out of Nemesis’s henchmen to maintain order in Fódlan—Seiros was no more enamored of the idea of the land being overrun by outside invaders than she was of different factions within the land tearing it apart in their hands. There were so many things she could have pointed to to explain herself, and none of them sat right on her shoulders. She could make none of them fit inside her mouth.

 _How dare I_?)

Indech, Seiros had hoped she would be able to persuade to stay by her side. Garreg Mach was not empty, but neither was it so heavily populated that it would have been impossible for Indech to find solitude within its walls, or in the mountains surrounding it. He was, somehow, able to treat the humans just as he had treated them before the massacre (Though he had, much to Seiros’s relief, ceased giving his blood to anyone who managed to complete the challenges he set down before them—their best hope for safety lied in secrecy, and Seiros didn’t think it would have taken much for someone cunning enough to pass one of Indech’s challenges to discern the truth from an infusion of Crest-bearing blood). Perhaps he would have liked the idea of shepherding them away from evil.

All of Seiros’s hopes for Indech came to nothing when he vanished from the monastery one day, without so much as a goodbye. It had taken more than a year of discreet inquiries before she could even figure out where it was that he’d gone, and when she went to speak to—no, confront—him, the words passed between them had not been what Seiros would call productive.

( _“I will do as I have always done, Seiros. I will wait here for challengers, and grant boons to the worthy.”_

_“And if Fódlan is invaded while you wait here? If the people tear the land apart?”_

_“That matters little. We are eternal, Seiros. You are yet young; you have not seen how the world can change as the centuries pass. In a thousand years, this place may not be called Fódlan at all.”_

Seiros could not think of something that filled her with greater fear than an unrecognizable world. Why should the world Mother created be allowed to change from her vision of it? Why should one mountain, one river, one tree, one blade of grass be in any way altered? The idea of a world Mother would not have recognized made Seiros feel as though the earth had vanished from under her feet. It would not be borne.)

Sweet Cethleann lied in her casket, not dead but sleeping, not dead, but may as well have been.

The words that had passed between Seiros and Cichol were better left forgotten.

Seiros had not expected to have to bring Fódlan to order alone. She’d not expected to have to live her life alone. Loneliness was hers, anyways.

-0-0-0-

As shards of glass were her memories, wicked and merciless, coursing through her flesh to settle in her heart and fester there, and Seiros clung to them anyways. Memories were all she was left with, and whatever tattered remnants of the life she’d once had were left to her, she would cherish.

The years went down, trudging on and on. Short-lived and self-important, the humans withered around her, and she stayed the same, and no one ever seemed to realize that she was not changing. Infusions of Crest-bearing blood could extend human lifespans long beyond what was normal, but Seiros knew she had a scant few decades before she would have to see to crafting a new identity for herself. Safety lied in control, safety lied in secrecy, and the world at large could never be allowed to realize that she was any higher than them. She had her lieutenants, and she kept them bound to her as best she could, but the rest, she would have to spin new tales for.

The years went down, and she clung to her memories even as they sliced through her flesh, but she found them blunting, gradually, crumbling at the edges with those particles disappearing from her sight forever.

Zanado, the sight of Zanado, was vivid in her mind. She had never known it as the barren wasteland Macuil had once described to her when she was very small. Mother had made it green and lush, and Seiros had never known unyielding earth where nothing grew. She remembered the city, remembered the home of her heart.

The sight of it was vivid in her mind, but something else had supplanted it. More vivid by far was the reek of blood, the clash of metal upon bone, the hair-raising screams that reverberated still in her ears, the flames that danced off the blade of that… that sword, the flames that shattered Seiros’s world beyond her ability ever to repair. She could still summon the memory of Zanado when it was whole. It was easier to remember the Red Canyon whispered of as a place haunted by ghosts and by demons.

(She had decreed Zanado to be off-limits to the layperson—indeed, to anyone who had not received her express permission. Even had Cichol not chosen it as the place to lay Cethleann to rest while she healed— _there would be no danger if you had brought her here; why is it that even_ you _have forsaken me?_ —the idea of further desecration was utterly unconscionable. Not one tree, one rock, one blade of grass could be altered. She could not bear it.)

She could remember the life she had led with her brothers and sisters, both those who lied in the crypt, and those mutilated into the shapes of swords and axes and spears and shields and staves. Their voices faded from her memory like mist dissolving in the face of the sun. It was easier to remember the shapes they’d been butchered into then it was to remember their smiling faces. Memory summoned the image of charred corpses oozing steaming blood before it dredged words or songs or games or anything, _anything_ that was not the cacophony of her desolation.

 _How easily the world tries to move on from us_.

She could remember being a child in her mother’s arms, her head against her mother’s breast and her mother’s fingers combing through her hair. The rhythm of Mother’s heartbeat was lost to her. The touch of her hand was a ghost without warmth or texture.

_I don’t want to forget._

All of Mother’s lullabies, Seiros could remember the words and the melodies perfectly. She could sing them all, though she was certain Mother wound have sung them better. The tone and timbre of Mother’s singing voice was lost to her.

_Am I to be left with nothing?_

The world of her childhood was stolen from her, and she was forced to make her way in the world of the thieves. But now, even the memory of her childhood world began to pale before the bloodied, desecrated landscape that now was hers.

Desolation was hers. She must dirty herself living in a world polluted by rivers of her brothers and sister’s blood. Ash was her tongue, and the wind howling over the battlefield was her voice.

No, no, it should not be. Why should the world of thieves she had been left with eradicate all that had been good in her life? She had known paradise, known perfect, unblemished bliss. Why should she submit to desolation’s rule over mind and memory?

No, no, she wouldn’t.

There must be another way.

-0-0-0-

She heard whispers of it from travelers who had risked (in more than one sense) trips to the land of Morfis. Seiros had little knowledge of Morfis, and less experience. She had never ventured beyond the bounds of Fódlan—Mother’s world was enough for her—and the borders of Fódlan were, while not shut in law, shut in the eyes of the Church—why should any of the people of this land not be content with what the Goddess had given them? Wilhelm had pressed her, assuring her over and over that it would do more harm than good to shut the borders completely, that it would be harmful to economy and safety alike, and eventually, Seiros had relented, if only because fomenting unrest in Fódlan so soon after they had put down Nemesis could potentially have been utterly destabilizing.

Seiros would strongly discourage, though not outright forbid, travel between Fódlan and the outside world. Mother had taken no interest in the world beyond Fódlan, and thus, there must be nothing of true value there, surely. She must set the example that the people were to follow; it was easy enough to follow her inclinations and never turn her attention to the lands beyond Fódlan.

Still, when the whispers reached her, Seiros listened. Given what they entailed, she was helpless to do anything _but_ listen.

Morfis was a land of powerful mages, sorcerers, and alchemists. Macuil had sojourned there for a time, several centuries past, and the knowledge he had brought back had, at least according to him, revitalized what had once been a faltering magical community within Fódlan. Seiros had not been there to bear witness to that. She knew only how useful his knowledge had been to them in times of war. If that had come to Morfis, perhaps there was the chance that even the knowledge of the benighted outer lands could be put to some good use.

The devout shuddered at the whispers of Morfis-magic, and they had whispers of their own to counter them: whispers of evil, of death, of ancient knowledge that would have been better left buried beneath the blistering sands. Seiros heard the whispers of Morfis-magic, and her mind sang to her of _hope_.

(And oh, what a sweetly poisonous song was hope.)

The world of thieves had taken Mother from her. How fitting that it should provide the tools by which Mother might be restored to her.

-0-0-0-

Two books were delivered to Seiros by a sunburned, limping knight, his face shadowed by several days’ worth of beard and his eyes hollowed out by some darting emotion she could not put a name to. He dropped them on the table separating the two of them as if letting fly hissing vipers, stammered his excuses, and left the room as quickly as his bandaged leg would allow. The sight of him evaporated from Seiros’s memory as soon as he escaped the room; all her attention was devoted to the tomes lying on the table before her.

One was a thick tome bound in cracked red leather, the pages rough and coarse, sticking out unevenly from under the binding. The other was a slender volume, bound in soft gray leather, with dark stains on the upper half of the front cover forming the shape of five long fingers, and part of a palm. That book smelled oddly sweet; only a second passed before Seiros decided she would be better off not thinking about that too hard.

If all had gone well, she had been brought two compendiums of Morfis-magic, something that could give her a clue of something, _anything_ she could do. Seiros had hoped for more, but oh, she had time. She had all the time in the world. If she took great enough care to not draw attention to what she was doing, she could send out expeditions as many times as she liked. It was not the work of a day, what she was doing, no matter how desperately she wished otherwise.

Of course, there was another reason this wouldn’t be the work of a day, one Seiros hadn’t considered before now, but the moment she opened the larger tome, it was staring her in the face.

Seiros had never traveled beyond the bounds of Fódlan. She had neither the need nor the inclination to concern herself with the lands that Mother had never concerned herself with. Never had she considered the finer points of life outside of Fódlan. It follows, then, that when she opened the book, she expected to see familiar words, letters, script. Why should she expect anything less?

What she got instead was a long, flowing script of absolute nonsense.

For a long moment, Seiros stared at the indecipherable… She wasn’t certain that they even qualified as _letters_ , that served as a solid wall between herself and anything resembling comprehension of what words—if they were even words at all—were written within. She blinked, long and hard, shut the book, and then turned it open to a different page. No, there was still nothing there that she could understand. There didn’t seem even to be illustrations.

Rage boiled up in her in a torrent. Seiros hefted the book and hurled it against the far wall before falling back into her chair, shoulders trembling with unspent energy. She would have loved nothing better than to scream, than to let the torrent overtake her, but she was not alone in this place, and she could not expose her true heart to them. Safety lied in appearing as the serene, unperturbable apostle of the Goddess. Her true self invited only danger. That did not mean she did not feel that rage inside.

Had that fool not even thought to ensure that the tome he found would be written in their tongue? Had he not thought to employ a translator to translate the text into something that she could actually understand? She had instructed him to take all the time he needed; could he not have spent that time wisely?

(During the war, Seiros and Macuil had often discussed—or argued about—strategy and tactics, how best to move the troops around to achieve their objectives with a minimum of losses. But for virtually everything else, she’d bounced ideas off of Cichol instead, anything that wasn’t related to their ultimate plan of action. She missed him. She missed being able to talk to him about these things. But he was too busy wallowing in his grief to help her with _anything_ , let alone trying to restore peace to the land or their mother to life, and—)

The prospect of potentially spending years trying to learn the language—if it even was a language; just looking at it, Seiros could easily have believed it all a child’s aimless scribbles—loomed before her like a black wave rising out of the sea, ready to put water down her throat and drown her. It would have taken long enough had she not been saddled with the task of bringing order to Fódlan unaided, and now… More contact with the profane than she was willing to tolerate, and yet…

The little gray book caught Seiros’s eye. She could have sworn that, in the amount of time her attention had been focused elsewhere, the hand-shaped stain on the upper half of the front cover had grown larger. She couldn’t remember it taking quite as much of the upper half as it did; nor could she remember the stain being quite so shiny. That was impossible, though, and she put the thought from her mind.

What little chance Seiros had of finding any intelligible language in this book seemed remote. It didn’t seem at all likely that the knight would have checked this book if he didn’t check the other one. Seiros sighed harshly, but she reached for the book regardless, her hand briefly overlapping the stain. It felt oily under her skin, but when she jerked her hand away, her skin was unblemished.

As it happened, neither was this book written in any decipherable tongue. It had something to it that the other book had not possessed, though: extensively present, extensively detailed illustrations.

In times yet to pass, Seiros would be so familiar with the process that she would no longer need to consult the book to carry it out. When familiarity lodged itself in memory’s eaves, it would be greeted with relief. Something about the illustrations in this book, the pictures, the diagrams, the tables and maps and that anatomical chart depicting its subject’s face locked in a silent rictus of agony, something about it made her stomach churn and her head spin.

Everything was cunningly drawn, delicately depicted in ink darker than the sky on a moonless night, ink so dark that it made their pages look as if they’d been cut in the shapes surrounding drawings and flowing script, and all beneath the pages fell into the incomprehensible void of Zahras. Everything was cunningly drawn, in such perfect detail, and colored so faithfully, that even with the presence of black lines of ink, it was difficult for Seiros to remember that it was a drawing she looked at, and not the real thing. Leering faces stared out at her when she would turn to a certain page; they would peek out at her and she’d jump. One page was given over entirely to a painstaking depiction of a deep crimson rose, and Seiros expected to catch a whiff of its perfume, before she remembered herself.

…Speaking of smells, that odd, sweet smell Seiros had detected emanating from the book had only grown stronger once the book was cracked open. With more exposure to it, Seiros thought it could have been sweet rot, or perhaps perfume that had been spilled on the book a very long time ago. Or perhaps it was something else. It settled in her nose like briars, stinging and sharp, making it just a little hard to breathe. The more Seiros thought about it, the less she thought she truly knew what this smell was at all. The more she dwelled on it, the more cloying it seemed, the stronger the putrid undertone she had barely discerned at first became.

Her initial opinion still seemed the wisest; better not to dwell on it.

Seiros pored over the disquieting illustrations, ignoring her discomfort as she searched the book for anything that looked like something she could have used. Mother knew the secret of creation; where Mother’s voice should have been, Seiros was shadowed by the silence of the grave. Macuil would likely have known how to decipher the maybe-text; the Wind Caller had lived up to his name and vanished to the howling wind, as if he’d never been there at all. She had determination, desperation, the tiniest scraps of knowledge, and nothing more. However much she might bloody her fingers trying to gain a handhold, well, pain was an old friend. She wouldn’t turn away from it when it was the thing that could most effectively drive her.

Life was pain. The people of this land had made sure of that. It would not be enough to stop her.

For such a slender volume, there seemed to be no end to its depths. The pages were made of some of the thinnest parchment Seiros had ever come across, faintly translucent in the light cast by the sun and, later, her lanterns.

It was in the gloom that she found it. Night had long since veiled the sun, and clouds veiled the Horsebow Moon. The candles in her lanterns were little red stubs in pools of sanguine wax, their flames in imminent danger of drowning. All who lived in the monastery had since sought out their beds, barring the night watch, and there was a freedom in that that Seiros could not help but savor.

It was only in small hours such as this one when the mask could lift, even partially. Only when out from under observation did she truly feel like her siblings’ sister, like her mother’s daughter. Perhaps that freedom had finally given her the eyes to see.

The page in question was towards the back of the book, and given over nearly entirely to a series of illustrations. A bowl of blood, a series of runes arrayed in a circle, a luminescent star. There were other things there, as well, but Seiros paid them no mind once she saw the image inked at the bottom. Once she caught sight of that image, her eyes were fixed upon it, blind to all else.

To wit: when Seiros’s eyes strayed to the bottom of the page, she saw inked there what appeared to be a human baby.

-0-0-0-

The star depicted life. That was all that Seiros could suppose. She had never known stars to represent anything else in iconography. A star represented life unbounded, life in its purest form. It represented Mother. But that was… She could not…

You could not create life from nothing unless it was by Mother’s power. Only she who claimed the power of the progenitor god held the secrets of creation in her grasp. But this was not creating life from nothing, and Seiros had always known that she would not be able to follow the process exactly. They were not humans, after all.

Life unbounded. Life in its purest form.

There was… one way, one way _only_ by which death could find one of Seiros’s people. The vile thieves had known it, clearly, just based on what precisely they thought to harvest from the bodies of her fallen kin. Perhaps… Perhaps the reverse was capable of restoring vitality. Or helping it along.

It was her one hope.

(Already, the poison had found its way into her veins. Soon, it would reach her heart, but by the time it did, it would have numbed all else too much for her to feel the difference.)

Hope carried her into the mausoleum, buoyed her just long enough to carry her through the threshold before it receded into the blackness that lurked always at the back of her mind. Hope carried her there and then fled, and she was left with the reality of this place.

The mausoleum was home to five sarcophagi. Three the feigned resting places of her three surviving brothers, one the near-resting place of her niece. The one set highest, the one all eyes would be drawn to when next Seiros saw fit to let other eyes light upon this place, was the sarcophagus that she would claim bore her own moldering corpse once she could no longer explain her longevity away with the blessings of Crest-bearing blood. They should all look at her, the one left behind, the one who remained to weave the lies that would ensure the safety of the rest. She who must live the lies, she who was here to control the stories that were told, they must look at her so that the others could pass unnoticed. In deception was where hope lied.

Here was one of the lies: the sarcophagus that would one day house the phantom remains of Saint Seiros did not lie empty.

It housed something far more precious, far more profane, than a non-existent corpse.

Seiros’s palms grew damp with sweat as she approached the sarcophagus. Her lungs ached for lack of breath; her heart ached for the bruising tattoo it made against her ribs. Deep within her, loss ached. Deep within her, loss screamed. It was always screaming, but there were times when it was quiet. Now, it silenced all the voices of the world with its din.

As her sweating hands went to the cold lid of the sarcophagus, Seiros’s strength seemed to fail her, her arms sapped of vitality so that it was a struggle to push the lid aside enough to reveal its contents.

She didn’t want to be here. She did not wish to return to this moment. She could already feel heat, despite the chill of autumn that had come over the Oghma Mountains with the first light of dawn. Sweat dripped down her brow, the phantom taste of blood emerging from the back of her throat to haunt her once again.

_Look now, who comes to claim spoils from the bones?_

They did it first, Seiros reminded herself, and the words were no consolation. The thieves had done it first, and to put right what had gone so horribly wrong, now she must do it, too.

Clouds were over the sun, and the stained glass windows were dull and lightless when Seiros pushed away the sarcophagus lid. When first she stared inside, she was met with the blackness of the void. It was dense, impenetrable, and truly, this must be what whispered-of Zahras was like, a deep, endless void that promised nothing but falling, falling, falling if you thought ever to step into it. Herself, Seiros did not even dare put her hand into that dark for fear, a stupid, childish fear, that something might reach back out to her.

( _she had wondered sometimes, desperately, so desperately, if their bodies could regenerate from the crest stones, if the spark of life mother used to create them was strong enough to recreate them, but oh, the stones were just cold in her hands, the empty shells of dead stars)_

Outside, clouds must have spun dancing away from the sun, for the windows were lit up in an array of scarlet and emerald and aquamarine, and the impenetrable darkness of the sarcophagus was shattered apart and stitched back together into gloom.

No softening gloom could deceive Seiros into regarding the sword as just a sword. No gloom could disguise the ragged segments, make them look like anything other than a

_Did you enjoy it, you filth? Did you enjoy plunging your blade into sleeping flesh, claiming spoils from the helpless? Did you enjoy turning her against her own children, did you enjoy our screams and our wails when we recognized your tool of death for what it was?_

She would wring their penance from them. It would _never_ be enough, but you could only kill someone once. Seiros could not march back to whatever trash heap they had left Nemesis in and take his life from him again. What she had from those who remained was not enough, but it was what she had.

There was a slight chill in the mausoleum. It was nothing to the stagnant, frigid air within the gloom of the sarcophagus. Outside, the air foretold autumn. Within the sarcophagus, the air spoke of winter eternal, the cold that knits itself into your bones so thoroughly that warmth will find you never again. Seiros’s fingertips brushed against the blade, and she could not hold back a whimper. Beneath her touch, the bones were imbued with a hungry, biting cold, waiting with eager malice for her hand to slip against the blade and give it blood to drink. She had wanted Mother’s warm and loving arms as many times as she had watched the sun go down over the mountains since she’d lost her. All that was left of Mother now were cold and hungry bones.

_I can have her back. I can bring her back, I will not have to face this down all alone, all will be as it should be, I just need to see this through—_

The Crest stone, a heart made into a power source for a terrible weapon, but there had been a lot of that going on, hadn’t there? The Crest stone glinted in the scant light that touched it, a livid, bloody red that dripped, dripped, dripped across the bottom of the sarcophagus. Another empty shell of another dead star, perhaps, but Seiros prayed that this was not the case. Its owner had been the progenitor god; if the spark of life could persist anywhere, surely it was here.

This could not wait. Seiros clutched at the Crest stone where it was lodged in the pommel of the sword, beating down the wave of nausea that threatened to overwhelm her when her skin came into contact with the unyielding flesh of the stone. She gripped the stone in her hands, bile bubbling sour in her throat, and pulled.

The stone was more easily wrested from its place than Seiros would have supposed, though to a human it must have seemed firmly embedded, indeed. Her palms were so slick that it slipped from her grasp and fell with a hard clack to the ground. Seiros watched in giddy horror, a scream rising in her throat, as it rolled around the floor, the rattle of flesh against stone deafeningly loud, until it finally came to rest against the base of the sarcophagus she had told everyone held Cethleann.

_Anyone could look at this and think it a child’s toy._

This was what they had been reduced to.

It would not be borne.

Seiros retrieved the Crest stone from the dusty floor, secreted it away in the pocket of her robes, and made the final descent.

-0-0-0-

The sarcophagi in the Holy Mausoleum were (mostly) empty. The sarcophagi in the Holy Tomb were not. When Seiros wrapped herself in the clammy dark of the crypt, illuminated only by the watery green fluorescence of wall-mounted lamps, she knew that she was not alone. She was simply the only thing there to draw breath.

Some had been recovered from Nemesis’s stronghold, and others from the strongholds of his henchmen. Seiros was uncertain as to why they had never been given to others of the thieves, since vials of blood matching the Crests had also been found; perhaps Nemesis had feared to share his power too freely. Seiros had had Wilhelm dispatch only the most loyal, the most discreet, to bring them back to Garreg Mach, where they were laid quietly to rest in their tombs, far away from prying eyes. Splinters of bone and dully glinting Crest stones, that was all that was left of them now, nothing to hold or cradle, nothing recognizable as having once been a person except to the trained eye.

Others had been abandoned in Zanado after the massacre. Perhaps Nemesis had thought them to have sustained the same sort of damage that had seen some corpses with blood burned completely away, with Crest stones utterly obliterated. (He’d not ben as skilled with the sword, back then. It must have been very… very new.) Seiros had not thought to lay the remains somewhere safe, not I the burning, blood-soaked wreckage of everything she had ever known, and she could only credit Indech’s soothing hand sliding down her back, Indech’s quiet voice: _“We should bring them out of the sun and the rain, should we not, little sister?”_

One had vanished into the mists of the remote eastern forests. Seiros’s first impulse was to order Maurice found so that she could collect the Crest stone from him _personally_. It would have been easy; even his comrades in butchery had turned against him once his corpse-gleaned power had proven impossible for him to control. But after she gave it a moment’s thought, she thought it might be more _instructive_ to leave him that way for a while. He and his had treated her and hers as beasts, as nothing more than the value of their blood and their bones. See how he liked being a beast deemed nothing more valuable than the sum of his parts. Maurice had once been a mighty hunter. See how he liked being the hunted, wherever he went, for the rest of his life.

Many more were just, just lost, and Seiros wondered if it wasn’t their fate to be swallowed by the sands of time. But for those that remained to her, there was the crypt.

She was not alone here, though she was surrounded by empty shells, devoid of life. ( _If this works—_ ) It kept Seiros quiet, her steps measured, as she approached the empty space before the dais.

(She could remember a time when the throne was caked with old blood, when the dais was painted red.)

(Why was it so easy to imagine them all alive, watching her walk past, when she could no longer remember their voices?)

She had already set out the book, chalk, a bowl, and nearly everything else she would need, besides the Crest stone. The doors into the mausoleum were shut and barred, no one here but Seiros knew how to operate the mechanisms to grant access to the crypt, and she had told those upstairs that she was going into seclusion to pray, that they should not expect her back for several hours, possibly not until the following morning. She had some time, but she should not waste it.

Hardly an easy task to sketch out a circle of such intricate runes as were shown in the book when her only light source were lamps mounted on the far-off walls, but Seiros had the task completed after what she thought might have been ten minutes, maybe fifteen. Perhaps she should have taken a little longer, but the sweet-putrid smell emanating from the book had struck her down with dizziness after she pored over a certain rune for more than a few seconds, and she was eager for any excuse to shut it and push it away. Compared to that, setting out the other paraphernalia was simply done, quickly done.

Next, her eyes strayed to the bowl.

It was glossy white porcelain, edged with interlocking black and purple rectangles, laced through with filaments of gold. It could hold, when full, perhaps a cup of liquid, and the gold filament flickered like veins of fire in the light. Seiros liked the thought, though she liked less what she must needs do next.

Blood had filled the bowl in the illustration. Clearly, it had been blood; there was no way to mistake it for anything else.

Human blood would not do. It was not a human that was to be created (reborn) here today.

She could not call upon her kin, not when she did not know yet if it would _work_.

Seiros took her dagger from her belt. She had brought Nemesis’s wretched life to an end with this dagger. So many uses had this dagger, and today it would find one more.

Where best to set the point of the dagger? Seiros had some knowledge of anatomy, all of it earned in bitterness, but her reason magic had always come to her more easily than faith magic, and part of that stemmed from the fact that she had never had the easiest time retaining the information found on anatomical charts, or the information a sister now lost had tried to teach to her. She knew which spots, when stabbed or slashed or bombarded by an exceptionally strong spell, would cause death in short order, and that was about the extent of Seiros’s knowledge of anatomy.

Where could she cut, and not cause damage so severe that she wouldn’t be able to leave the crypt under her own power?

Oh, no, this was not worth worrying about. Her healing magic was strong enough to knit herself back together—and the damage would be worth it, anything would be worth it, if this was successful.

It would be worth it.

It would be worth it, Seiros told herself, over and over, as she held her arm over the bowl, and dug the tip of her dagger into her yielding flesh.

Immediately, Seiros’s stomach dropped, the pain _nothing_ against the sensation of her blood leaving her body, the loss of it into that bowl. All of her awareness narrowed to a fine point on the awful sound of dripping, first against porcelain, then blood against blood, dripping, plopping, _sloshing_ within the bowl. She wanted to retch as the smell hit her, a smell that went so far beyond iron that it was almost sweet. As more of her blood was given to the hungry porcelain mouth open wide beneath her arm, Seiros had to direct more and more of her energy to keep from falling into a swoon. She must see this through. She must. She…

She had never done this gladly. Nor freely. Macuil had never done it at all. Indech once gave of himself to those who passed his trials, trusting that those whom he bestowed power upon would use that power wisely, and thus far, most of them had. Even Seiros would grant them that. Cethleann had given of herself to the dying, until she, too, was on the verge of death. She had spread herself too thin, and the ingrates never understood just what it was she had risked by saving them.

Herself, Seiros had seen no other way to secure cooperation, secure loyalty, secure obedience. She could not have bound Wilhelm and his people to her, to _her_ , not by any other means. She could not have ensured the discretion of her cardinals by any other means. No way but this.

Cichol…

With Cichol, Seiros did not know the circumstances behind the others, nor the reasoning. She only knew Leandra.

She had counseled against it, you know. Seiros could cast no spite on Cethleann’s existence, nor wish otherwise the reality of her life, but still, she had counseled against it. Macuil had counseled against it. Even Indech had counseled against it, which had at first surprised Seiros as much as it relieved her, though once he’d elaborated— _“Is it worth it, to have such a short term of happiness, and then spend the rest of eternity grieving? Please, little brother, think about what you are doing_.”—it no longer surprised Seiros at all.

But some fragment of the man Cichol had been before Seiros carried news of the massacre to him in Enbarr must have survived, for he ignored them all and gave Leandra his vows, his blood, his love, so _terrifyingly_ freely. They had not known then, not yet known what would run true. They had not known that one of their people and a human could produce a child together. When Leandra fell pregnant, the reaction from Cichol—and Seiros, too, as it happened—had been bewilderment bordering on outright panic. The price of treading new ground and choosing to run across it, rather than walk.

Seiros had warmed to Leandra just in time for Leandra to be struck down in battle, and now, Seiros found herself thinking about her for the first time in years. Found herself thinking about Cichol in the position she was in now for the first time at all.

What had Cichol been thinking, when he took a knife to his own flesh? Thinking of Leandra, most likely; that was, she reflected, a silly question. What had he felt? Seiros tried to imagine joy, giddy anticipation, love, but they all fled the touch of her mind in the face of everything she felt, whenever she found herself in this place again, bartering her birthright _again_ for one more scrap of support, one more assurance of safety that could turn rancid at any moment.

(She gave them power. It had not escaped her notice that they could use that power against _her_.)

This was no occasion for joy. This was the bitter ash of defeat, the clammy slime of appeasement, the knife between the ribs of treating herself just as they had treated her kin, a commodity to be traded and exploited, nothing more valuable than the sum of her parts. Seiros had not been whole in heart and mind since the bloodletting in Zanado; she’d not been whole in body since she first gave her blood to Wilhelm. Bring Seiros to this place, and what she could see more vividly than anything else was her body bled dry as Cethleann had almost been bled dry, and everyone who had taken of her blood walking away from her shriveled corpse, none the wiser as to just what they had done.

And now, it was to Seiros the sweetly poisonous song of hope, as well.

Difficult as it was to see clearly past the spots of black now clouding her vision, Seiros could at least make sense of when the bowl was as close to full as it could be without overflowing once the final component was added. She took the dagger away from her arm, letting it clatter to the ground, an emotion too hollowed-out and exhausted to be relief coursing through her with the knowledge that _finally_ , this was over.

White light stuttered and faltered the first few times Seiros tried to summon healing magic. All the while, blood dribbled from the wound, sparkling in the watery light with the radiance of dying starlight.

Eventually, the wound was closed, though the black spots in Seiros’s eyes had grown to devour half of her sight in nothingness. Her body felt entirely too light, strength waned almost to nothingness in her limbs, and this, she knew she could not will away with magic. Let time heal her, and no other.

The Crest stone went in the bowl with a sickening little splash, spraying drops of blood onto the ground and the skirt of Seiros’s robes. She had no idea what would happen now, if there would be a flash of light, or a gust of wind (Or, most terrible of all, absolutely nothing).

She…

The darkness was spreading through her eyes, drowning the world.

She didn’t…

Everything went black.

Seiros never did discover just what it was that happened, what form the activation of magical power took (Something she’d never ask herself: perhaps it would have been more instructive to see it for herself). She awoke sometime later, perhaps a few seconds later, perhaps a few minutes, perhaps a few hours, her body stiff and numb against cold stone, and it took several blinks of the eyes to banish the clouds from her sight.

She looked to the center of the circle, and all fatigue vanished from within her, replaced by a fierce, overpowering joy.

The bowl laid on its side, completely empty. The Crest stone was gone. And there, in the center of the circle, lied an infant girl.

-0-0-0-

Had Seiros truly been paying mind, she would have nevertheless been unsurprised when Reinhild did not ask nearly as many questions as she could have at having a naked baby thrust into her arms. Not once had the woman ever questioned anything Seiros told her; she simply accepted the information, and did as she was told. Would that the others of her people would behave the same way.

“The child is in our care, now. She is to be given the _best_ of care,” Seiros was careful to emphasize, “and she should not be given over to any outside wet nurse or foster mother. She is a ward of the Church; I wish to be kept apprised of her progress, of any concerns for her health, anything you consider notable.”

Reinhild nodded absently, taking the veil from her cap to use as a blanket for the baby, who was beginning to squirm uncomfortably, tiny fussy noises escaping her mouth. “Of course, your Grace.” Then, she looked up to Seiros herself, and her brow furrowed. “Your Grace, if I may…” She was wearing the same expression she had worn when Seiros turned to her and offered her a shard of her Crest stone; she was the only one of the cardinals who had refused, and had paled at the suggestion. “You seem unwell. Should I call for a healer?”

“Hmm? No, Reinhild; there will be no need for that.” Seiros smiled, a true, buoyant smile the likes of which she’d not felt in decades. “Now, I must see to my duties. Good day.”

“Oh, Lady Seiros?” Reinhild called after her as she was leaving. “What is the child’s name?”

“As of yet, she has none,” Seiros replied lightly. “You may give her one yourself, if you wish. Good day, Reinhild.”

(She would not be using it but for a scant few years, at most, but if it gave them comfort, they could give the vessel a name.)

The sun shone down upon her as she exited the cathedral. Its warmth was almost as comforting as her mother’s embrace.

-0-0-0-

There was no precedent for this sort of achievement, not within Seiros’s knowledge, not within her lifetime. She had no idea when her mother’s consciousness would present itself. Perhaps the baby now ensconced in a nursery on the level above the reception hall would, once she was old enough to have any true claim to intelligence, always know herself to be Sothis given new flesh. Perhaps the knowledge would come later. Perhaps it would need a certain… _push,_ to make itself manifest. There were so many possibilities encompassed under what the future held, and Seiros, no philosopher or alchemist, was unequal to the task of conjuring them all.

Soon, now; soon, it would be. The multitude of years without her mother’s love had been unbearable as moonless, starless, unceasing night. Those years had been as barren as the wastes of Sreng in the depths of winter. The world had not… It had not felt right. Even now, it felt askew, uneven on its axis, shifting beneath Seiros’s feet like sand. But soon, all would be put to rights. Seiros’s heart sang at the thought.

(Briefly, her mind strayed to other things. How would she tell the others? This would all doubtless be incomprehensible to Cichol and Indech, neither of whom had ever taken much interest in magic as either a tool in combat or a subject of study. If Cichol happened to quit his sojourn in Zanado and make the journey to Garreg Mach while the vessel was as yet unaware of her true identity, if Seiros told him what she had done, he might take the situation to be something entirely other than what actually was. Macuil might understand more, as a practitioner of magic, as a once-student of Morfis-magic, but in exchange for such knowledge, might he not…

No, Seiros could not consider such things. It was unfathomable that they would not be happy to see Mother restored to life. A drop of joy that could drown a sea of sorrow, it was. They would be happy, as she was happy.)

If the vessel did require a push to recover what was lost, Seiros would give it, gladly. Never let it be said that she had made her mother a new body with which to experience the world, and then lent her no aid in recovering the use of it. Seiros was no ingrate; certainly, she was not an ungrateful child who would forsake her mother the way too many humans forsook their parents upon achieving full maturity. Loyal, she would be, to the bitter end, though finally Seiros would have experience of an end that was not bitter.

Reinhild had named the baby…

The thought crossed Seiros’s mind as a cloud drifting over the sun, as another, darker cloud trailed after it: she could not remember just what Reinhild had named the baby. But those were fleeting thoughts. It did not matter what the vessel had been named, when she would be using that name for scant years at best.

“I will show you the way,” Seiros murmured to the baby, when next she had occasion to enter the nursery. As she slept so peacefully (a sleep she would wake from, so different from the last sleep Mother had enjoyed in this place, in her original coat of flesh), Seiros chanced a glance towards the door, then leaned down over the crib and whispered, “As you once showed me how to live, I will show you the way back to yourself.” She smiled, swallowing down hard on a hot, leaden lump that had formed suddenly in her throat. “I hope to speak with you soon, Mother.”

The baby, still sleeping, of course did not answer her.

-0-0-0-

Years whose passage had been fleet-footed seemed to have been lamed, quite possibly by the ghost of Nemesis in one last effort to spite Seiros as much as he could. The months, the weeks, the _days_ dragged on so much that if you were to tell Seiros that time itself had been slowed, she would have been hard-put to disbelieve it.

Constantly was she bogged down in minutiae, in petty grievances and pettier conflicts. The Almyrans misliked how the eastern border of Fódlan had been demarcated after the end of the war, in spite of the fact that land they were trying to claim as theirs was completely unsuitable to growing crops, mining, or anything that would have made it _valuable_ to them. Certain newly-created nobles were making discontented noises about the size of their domains, as if Seiros didn’t have in her grasp so many strings she could pull to undo all that they had built up if they thought ever to break with her.

There were rumblings of Dagdan raiders harrying the far southeastern coast. Apparently a village or two had been burned, and all their residents were missing. Not dead, just missing, and unfortunately, Seiros could not think of too many reasons why raiders would be making off with captives and then never following their kidnapping up with a ransom demand. (Humans, maybe, but the thought still made her blood boil. _We are none of us things to be traded, commodities to be bartered away_. Perhaps this wasn’t quite as petty as the rest of it.)

Most irksome of all: the denizens of the far reaches of Fódlan, who refused to accept the Goddess for what she was, clung to their demon spirits, their false gods, and spat in the face of true sanctity. She would deal with them in time. When the borders were secure, when the lands beyond theirs no longer troubled them, she would deal with them. No heresy within this holy land. No heresy to fester within the cradle of life. It was Seiros’s duty to tend the garden, and uproot the weeds. She would not shirk it.

Seiros had not nearly enough time to tend to the vessel as she would have liked; her attention was constantly being dragged to other things. For the most part, the vessel was left in care of Reinhild and those subordinates of Reinhild’s who could be trusted to raise a child in proper reverence and enlightenment. But even amidst all the petty cares life insisted on throwing Seiros’s way, she still found time to spend with the vessel—even if she had to wrench that time out of the hands of minutiae itself.

The vessel had grown from a baby that mostly cooed and slept to a toddler constantly attempting to outpace her minders. She looked… Seiros could not help but frown to herself, whenever this topic came to mind.

The vessel’s colorings were Nabatean, and yet not. Her hair was a darker, duller green than Seiros’s, just a touch lighter than Mother’s had been. Her eyes were a green-tinged, chalky blue that shone brightly even when no light shone around her. The spark that Seiros saw shining within her was not the spark of her people. It was not the guttering flicker of the humans, short-lived and feeble. It was something separate from both.

(Something she would never ask herself: might it not have been better to learn the language of the Morfis-folk before she attempted the ritual?)

It was all just a little jarring to Seiros, though the moment she caught herself admitting it, shame forced her to tamp the thoughts down, shove them far from anywhere the light of day could have touched them. Mother’s vessel had an oddness to her countenance that Seiros simply could not place, and would never place, and she dwelled on it, then killed the thought, then found herself dwelling on it again.

Cethleann had not been like this. The child of a Nabatean and a human, and yet there had been nothing in her that Seiros could see that threw to her human mother; every last thing had run true in her. She had even possessed a unique Crest, and Cichol and Macuil had spent a multitude of hours trying to piece together how _that_ could have been. The Crests were Mother’s creations; given the way Crests were “inherited” when passed to humans, it seemed far more likely that Cethleann inherited her father’s Crest than manifest a unique one, and yet…

_There is so much we do not know about ourselves. Every step we take forward is like putting one of our feet over the edge of a cliff. Mother could have answered every one of our questions. When she remembers herself, perhaps she will._

Seiros thought it prudent not to draw attention to the fact that the vessel bore a Crest at all. The attention drawn would certainly have included prying eyes and grasping hands and questioning minds journeying in directions they ought not. Perhaps in a generation or two, when the descendants of the Hresvelgs and the ones Seiros’s kin had given their blood two were more numerous, when the descendants of the thieves and butchers were more numerous, it would have been safer to let it be known. Not now. Now was too soon for true safety, but it could not have waited.

She would have to harbor the questions, for now. Mother would put all mystery to rest when she remembered herself again.

For now, the vessel was a toddler who loved nothing more than to escape the watch of her minders and run about the second floor over the reception hall, and Seiros could wait. She’d waited years and decades and what felt like an eternity to feel the warmth of her mother’s embrace. She could wait scant years without issue.

-0-0-0-

As the child grew, from two years to three to four, Seiros discovered something else about her, beyond the fact that she would have run the length of the world if her minders would but let her. The weather around the monastery during the rainy season was not as intense as it could be in Enbarr in the furthest southern reaches of the Empire, but still, the strongest of the storms occasionally made their way north into the Oghma Mountains.

Seiros rarely took special notice of the storms of the rainy season, except when the battering of the wind shivered the windowpanes or the booming of the thunder threaded itself into the foundations. If the storms threatened to bring down one of the buildings on the grounds of the monastery, let Seiros take notice. Otherwise, she had far more important things to attend to.

She was not alone in this opinion. Many of her subordinates would brave the lashing rain without complaint or, indeed, comment, so long as it did not seem as if the wind might lift them off the ground while they were walking from the shelter of one building to another. (There had been some talk of erecting canopies over some of the paths—a roof over the bridge to the cathedral was especially desired, given the sheer, mortal drop to which one would be subjected if they fell over the railings. Perhaps, one day. Seiros herself would not mind the opportunity to avoid soaked vestments when she made the walk to the cathedral for services. For now, though, they had weightier concerns than this.)

Seiros could not remember how she had taken to adverse weather as a small child. It had been, after all, a very long time ago, and the fog of memory only grew foggier the further back into childhood she delved. She had not been around Cethleann enough when the latter was a very young child to know how _she_ had coped with the storms that raged in Enbarr when the rains came up from the south. This was her only frame of reference, and most of it had receded into the impenetrable fog that was the too-distant past.

There was but one child within the current landscape of her life, but one child whose importance rose high enough to catch her attention, and whenever a storm visited Garreg Mach, that child set to wailing so loudly that Seiros thought the wind waxed in fury just to outdo her.

Sleep did not find her on nights such as this one, nights that saw Seiros lighting a lantern and making the walk from her quarters to the nursery. Her sleep had not been sound since her feet were washed in warm blood and her mouth was bathed in ash, and the sound of the child wailing at the top of her lungs transformed her sleep from unsound to non-existent. She might as well _do_ something to pass the hours she would be spending awake.

One of the nuns assigned by Reinhild to watch over the child was fussing over the little bed set up in the nursery when Seiros arrived at the door. Seiros watched the curve of the woman’s back sag as she bent a little lower over the distraught child. Whatever she was trying to do to comfort her, it clearly wasn’t working; the child’s cries grew ever more piercing as the next half a minute wore on.

“I will take care of the child tonight.” The nun jumped and whirled around; before she could stammer out any apology for not having noticed Seiros sooner, Seiros smiled and went on, “It is no trouble. The hour is late, and you have duties come the morning. Please, take the opportunity to rest.”

All these years, and it still surprised Seiros how quickly humans were to take her smiles at face value. No matter how forced they felt in her own mind, they set the recipient at their ease. It was a gift, Seiros knew, and one she ought to be grateful for, but the disconnect still grated against her skin, as if she was wearing a cilice under her robes as some of the cardinals had taken to as penance.

The gift that grated at least saw the nun hurrying from the room, leaving Seiros alone with the child, so Seiros would try to ignore how it grated, at least for tonight.

After the nun was gone, the wailing quieted a little, but it persisted still, a little rippling wave of misery that lapped at Seiros’s feet, smelling of salt instead of copper, but disorienting, nonetheless.

The walls of the bed—it wasn’t a crib anymore, not really; it was far too large and it couldn’t be rocked—were high enough that the vessel couldn’t see someone until they were standing right over the bed. Sometimes, Seiros wondered if the vessel could sense her presence before laying eyes on her. She wanted to believe she could. She wanted to believe that—

Faith.

She cloaked herself with it, wove it into the foundations of everything her life touched.

Judging by the nagging fears and doubts that arose, faith did not care to follow Seiros into this place.

Bloodshot and rimmed with red, the chalky blue-green of the vessel’s eyes were made so vivid that al color surrounding them were gray as ash. The moment Seiros drew to the bed, those eyes were on her, and Seiros could see nothing in her that suggested anything but an ordinary child (however little experience she might have of ordinary children), an ordinary child who stared accusingly up at her, as though she was at fault for the storm that raged outside, disrupting her sleep.

Speech was late coming for the child—Seiros was to understand that most human children could string full sentences together by this age, and yet this child said nothing. Not silent, certainly; could get her point across, certainly. But nothing intelligible issued from her mouth, and Seiros wondered at times if anything ever would. Perhaps she would hear no words from those lips until they spoke with Mother’s voice. Or perhaps speech was simply late for coming, and she would hear words by year’s end. She could do nothing but fumble blindly forward.

Seiros was not an ungrateful child. She was not an ungrateful child, her mind put groggily together as she lifted the child up into her arms. The sleep that would not come to her taunted her with fatigue and visions of how stiff and sore she would be when the morning came, how tired she would be the next day with no opportunity to rest. But she was not ungrateful, so she took the child to the rocking chair and sat her down on her lap, and did her best to ignore the fatigue that would not translate into sleep, no matter how dearly she wished for it to. She had had plenty of experience with that.

As a rule, Seiros did not sing her mother’s songs where she thought that anyone else could hear. Sacrosanct they were, and subjecting them to the listening of transitory ears felt as utterly wrong as any sacrilege. She harbored fears at times that sharing them would dilute the power of her memory of them; she would be stretching her memories far too thin to hold onto them and not rip them apart.

Singing was one thing. Humming was another. Humming did not carry through walls; at least, Seiros had never encountered any evidence to suggest that it did. And rocking the chair would soothe them both, at least for a little while, until lightning lit the window up again and the child’s whines would turn to screams.

 _Do you recognize this tune_? Seiros wondered as she ran through the verse for the third time. _Do you know the words, even if you have yet to speak? Or have you yet to remember anything at all? Do you still believe yourself an ordinary child? How may I help you remember?_

The vessel gave no answer; she must not, being speechless. Her little body trembled in Seiros’s arms, but the more Seiros rocked the chair, the more she hummed, the quieter she became. Her wails became hiccupping little sobs, became intermittent moans that sounded more like the lowing of the wind through the bare trees of autumn than a sound that would come from any sort of mouth. She rested her head against Seiros’s chest and shut her eyes. It was perhaps a minute before Seiros realized that she had fallen asleep.

As soon as the child showed signs of comfort, Seiros began to feel what little comfort she could find flee her. Suddenly, the cushioned chair was rock hard, digging into her spine as sharply as the blade of any knife. Suddenly, the air was stale and choking. Suddenly, her mouth was dry as the desert wastes of Sreng.

She tried to imagine what Cichol had felt, holding Cethleann as a little girl, but she was not her brother and could not ken at his thoughts, let alone his feelings. His sensibilities were a world apart from hers. They were… They were just different. And this could not be her child.

Holding the child in her arms, Seiros could feel her blood sloshing around in a body that was not her own. Nausea tugged insistently on her stomach as the sleeping child shifted in her arms; all that blood, all _her_ blood, and it was just… there, in someone else’s body. There for someone else to do with it as they would, while Seiros was left to fumble around the wound left by its absence, another piece of her bartered away to another person in exchange for something she so desperately needed.

_You must remember soon. Only you can—_

There was something trying to find its voice beneath that slippery feeling of blood lost and gone to another person completely insensible of the sacrifice that they had benefited from. It was trying to sing. But it did not sing with the voice of hope, and it could not ever expect to overpower sweet hope’s sweet poison, let alone that slippery, _sloshing_ feeling. So it went silent, and sank back down into the fog.

-0-0-0-

Banditry had been a blight upon Fódlan for as long as Seiros could remember living in any part of it but Zanado. They were lawless times, those first few years she had been alone, and bandits had numbered plenty among those she slew. The blight had only waxed in size and putrescence, and she could only assume that they still eagerly followed the example Nemesis had set for them.

…Except now, it had been so long since Nemesis had died that none but those given a _large_ infusion of Crest-bearing blood would be able to remember him. Even his henchmen were starting to die off, though one of them had not died of natural causes. (Seiros had considered going north to collect the Aegis Shield from Fraldarius’s moldering corpse. Had she needed to pry it from the hands of all of Fraldarius’s blood-soaked little whelps, it would not have been too much effort. But it would have raised questions that Seiros did not care to answer, especially not to the beneficiaries of her misery, and so she let the matter lie, for now. Let the whelps keep their stolen blood and their stolen bones. If they had their mother’s wisdom, perhaps she would be able to lay that sister to rest in the crypt within a few years. She would have her own, in the end.) Ah, well. Seiros had had more than enough experience of human greed and human cruelty to know that the rotten seed of Nemesis’s malice lived on, even if his bloodline was effaced from this world. It was up to her to ensure that no new Nemesis would arise from each new generation of humans living in this land.

Ensuring that no new Nemesis would rear his head involved gathering the faithful knights of the land to her. She could not requisition the entirety of the Empire’s armies—those were still needed to secure the southern borders against Dagdan raiders—but it would be a simple thing to establish an order of her own. The faithful wished for a quiet land as much as she did.

( _“It will take time, your Grace. There is much that goes into the creation of an order of knights; it is not the work of a day.”_

_“Of that, I am well aware. There is little we can do to secure the future of Fódlan that can be done in the space of a day. Still, we must make haste. The troubles that necessitate a new order of knights will only grow more vexing as time wears on.”_

_“As you say, your Grace.”_ )

For now, villages were popping up in the mountains surrounding Garreg Mach where they had never existed before. Even in such a fertile land as Fódlan, the heights of the Oghma Mountains were, Seiros would have thought, not considered an optimal location for settlements. Unless they found space in one of the few valleys to be found nestled between the peaks and crags, there was little land on which to farm, and few ways to reach the outside world to trade for goods. Seiros had made certain to secure the few reliable roads that connected the monastery to the outside world; she had no desire to starve during winter, and even less desire to be beholden to highwaymen demanding “tolls” for safe passage. The rest, she knew, were plagued by adverse weather and highwaymen alike.

Perhaps they thought that proximity to the monastery would grant them some sort of protection. That… was presuming a great deal, or so it seemed to Seiros, who knew that the guards stationed at the monastery were there to protect the _monastery_ , and that there were barely enough of them to do even that.

_If someone sent a large force against us, they would be helpless to drive them out. I would have to—_

Hence, the need for an order of knights. And possibly quite a bit more than that. The villagers hoping to leech protection off of Garreg Mach would just have to wait.

The vessel had begun to speak, albeit in the way her caregivers would have expected a two or three-year-old child to speak, rather than a girl of five. However, speak she did, and she was progressing in a manner that would have been normal were she a couple of years younger, so the nuns were optimistic that her speech was merely delayed, rather than permanently impaired in some fashion.

Her education would have to be somewhat delayed in beginning, or so her caregivers insisted. There had been a never-ending, revolving queue of nuns and priests reading to the girl since she was old enough that those around her thought she understood what was being said to her (and possibly even before that), but they felt that anything more would have to wait until she was speaking in whole sentences and could be properly instructed.

How long could that take? Seiros had asked.

The nuns had no idea. It tended to vary, when a child began to speak so much later than usual. Perhaps it would be within a matter of weeks, but it could be anywhere as long as another year.

A year seemed an immeasurably long time to wait to have an _actual_ conversation with her. Seiros was no thrall of time, however, and she would simply resign herself to wait.

In the meantime, she watched, and waited.

(But oh, she had had her fill of watching and waiting—she’d had her fill of it years and years ago and Wilhelm and Macuil and Cichol told her over and over again that they must _wait_ for an opportunity to strike against Nemesis, that the time was not yet ripe to test their strength. Raiding the borders of Nemesis’s domain had never sat well with her; letting him think of her as nothing more than another thorn in his side had sat about as well as a knife would have sat between her ribs. Why was it always that she could not act _now_?

She must learn patience, she knew. She had no reason _not_ to be patient, not when time held no dominion over her. She must learn patience; this was not the work of a day. Oh, she wanted—)

For now, Seiros watched, and waited, searching so carefully for any hint of the divine shining under crude flesh.

Anything she could have taken heart in, she would have taken heart in. The slightest flash of light would have been blinding to Seiros’s eyes, obliterating and revelatory. The slightest thing provided for her to latch on to, she would have seized within both hands.

And it was not for lack of trying: there were many occasions on which Seiros found herself poring over every last action the vessel took, every last word that spilled from her mouth. Oh, the hours she spent picking apart every last expression and gesture, dissecting them whole and inspecting the results for anything which bore the slightest similarity to her mother’s mannerisms. (What had they been?) The slightest gram of similarity would have seemed a mountain in Seiros’s eyes.

Nothing.

Just… nothing.

This could have been one of the human children running around the monastery, if not for her hair and her eyes, if not for the spark in her that was neither human nor Nabatean. (So, not like a human at all, for all that frustration kept planting that thought deep in her mind.) Seiros searched and searched and never saw the divine within her, never saw anything within her that was familiar.

_What are you?_

The child slept contentedly in her bed, reflecting the peace of a quiet night and nothing else. Seiros stood alone in the nursery, staring down at her, a hard, bitter knot twisting in her stomach. Her hands were clenched, white-knuckled, on the bedframe, and for a long moment, Seiros wondered how long it would take for bones to break if she transitioned them from wood to flesh. Ten minutes? Five? A minute, or perhaps thirty seconds? Seiros had been an old hand at breaking bones by the time she had approached Nemesis with dagger in hand; though she had never paid much attention to time, she did not think it would take too long. All she must do was squeeze.

 _Why does nothing inspire remembrance within you?_ She could have screamed the question, if Seiros could find a voice with which to scream. _I have given you back your heart, I have given you a body with which to interact with the world again; I do not understand why you would not—_

No, these thoughts were blasphemy. Seiros was not an ungrateful child—however long it took her mother to emerge within the body of this child, that was the appropriate amount of time. Mother had always had reasons for everything she did.

It could be that she was waiting for her body to reach physical maturation, and that made a certain amount of sense: it did not do for the progenitor god to inhabit such an immature body. It could be that she was waiting for Seiros to quell the unrest that yet plagued Fódlan ( _I am trying_ ) before she would emerge back into the world to heal the wounded land. There could be any number of conditions placed upon Mother’s return to this world, and Seiros could never know what they were. She could only instill the Goddess’s order on the land, only instill proper worship, only exact proper penance (never enough for what they had done, but perhaps their remorse would touch the heart that sat within that sleeping breast), and hope.

Hope, and nurture Mother’s vessel in the meantime. If the child felt any shadow pass over her life, that could have any number of repercussions on the unyielding stony heart that dwelled within. Seiros must care. She must do better. All would be well. All would be well, if only Seiros kept faith, and did for Fódlan as mother would have done, were she here, were she cognizant of her identity and her power.

And if the vessel needed a push, Seiros would see what she could do in that regard.

(A bitter taste would persist in Seiros’s mouth for many days after, spoiling everything she ate, turning everything she tried to drink to wormwood in her mouth. She was never able to determine its source, and after a few days more, she ceased to think on it.)

-0-0-0-

“I wonder if you can learn this spell.” If Seiros’s voice carried within it a slightly teasing note, that was only natural. She had learned, these past few years, that the child responded to teasing by redoubling her efforts; any doubt that she could accomplish something only spurred her own to try harder out of sheer stubbornness.

And sure enough, at the teasing lilt that reached her ears, the child’s face screwed up, and her blue-green eyes fixed on the diagram. “I can do it, Lady Seiros.”

Truth be told, Seiros did not doubt it. Ten years had passed since she had created this body in the clammy embrace of the crypt, and in the three or so years since her formal education had begun, the child had proven herself a prodigy of reason and faith magic alike. She was the delight of all her tutors with how quickly she picked up _everything_ , really, and sometimes, when Seiros watched her learn arithmetic or history so quickly that anyone would have believed that she had been a master for years, she could not help but think—

(Her chest often ached. Seiros did not know why. She had long since grown numb to the poison everywhere else it lurked.)

“So you say.” A little more teasing, to provide the hook that would keep the child well and truly _anchored_ to this lesson. She needed to be anchored, needed to be paying her full, undivided attention, for— “But this is something you have never seen before, and how often can any of us ever say that?”

(She had striven so hard for a world where she would never have to contend with the unfamiliar. It was a poor balm, the idea that the land would never become unrecognizable to Mother’s eyes, but Seiros took what poor comfort she could find, wherever she could find it.)

“It is?!”

The vessel found the prospect of the unfamiliar entirely too exciting for comfort, but when Seiros watched her eyes light up, what clenched her aching heart in its grasp, it felt… There was pain there. There was always pain there. There was something else there, too.

“Please show me how to do it!” the child insisted, practically vibrating in place.

“Very well,” Seiros assured her, laughing under her breath. But then…

…Then, she had to pause a moment, when she realized that she really was laughing, that the noise that escaped her mouth was not forced, was an actual _laugh_ and not some strangled noise like the noise a cat made when it was being throttled. How… How many years, since that was last the case? (Cethleann had once given her a bottle of elixir flavored with honey, “to soothe your weary heart, my aunt, for I do never see you smile.”)

Slowly, the light in the child’s eyes dimmed. She shifted her weight awkwardly from one haunch to the other, regarding Seiros cagily. “Lady Seiros?”

“Let us begin,” Seiros told her, in place of anything else she could have said, injecting serenity so thoroughly into her voice that even she was fooled by it. (For a little while.)

They could be assured of privacy. Seiros had taken the child to her bedchamber on the third floor, almost directly over the audience chamber where she had dictated terms to so many arrogant lordlings. Firmly locked the door was, and only Seiros held the key; not even her cardinals had a way into this room that did not come from her. She had thought beforehand that the intimacy of such a setting might engender discomfort, but soon found that the promise of privacy, of being able to make this _push_ away from prying eyes, obliterated any such considerations. Seiros could kneel on the floor of her bedchamber with no hesitation, no nagging second thoughts.

“First, you must read the diagram, and read it carefully,” Seiros instructed, letting the teasing out of her voice and letting firmness in to sit upon its chair. “When you have finished, you must first tell me what the spell is. Once you have done that, I will provide a demonstration. Then, you may try it yourself.”

Such a sponge for knowledge, this child. (Or was she only remembering?) As her eyes fixed again upon the diagram, mouth pressed into that little frown of concentration that had become so familiar over the past two years, Seiros was beset with a torrent of emotions while watching her. Most of them did not have names, except what they screamed when they raced from the abyss, and what they screamed when they were beaten back down with everything else Seiros had had to lock away when she quit the blood-soaked fields of Tailtean.

While Seiros had ultimately felt no aversion to using her bedchamber as the site of this lesson, producing this diagram in the first place had been a significantly more trying effort. She did not wish to share this magic with outsiders—it was sacrosanct, it was _hers_ , let no eyes that did not look upon it in happier times look upon it now and sully it. Let it not be diminished within her memory by this sort of damaging contact.

But there must needs be _something_ with which to give the vessel a push in the right direction. There must needs be something that would jog her memory. So Seiros let the work be sullied by as yet ignorant eyes, tried to ignore the way she could feel the dirt seeping under her skin, and reminded herself that when Mother remembered herself, it would no longer be a matter of the outside world knowing something it shouldn’t. The knowledge would be diluted no longer.

However long the vessel’s eyes had been searching Seiros’s face while Seiros was lost in her own reverie, could not be determined. The vessel had grown to be a quiet, obedient child, and would never be caught clearing her throat or trying to catch someone’s attention when that someone was clearly thinking about something.

“Yes?” It was important to be gentle. It was important not to give away that there was anything truly significant to any of this. “Have you finished reading the diagram?”

A solemn little nod preceded the answer. “Yes, Lady Seiros?”

“Well?” Seiros prompted. “Do you know what sort of spell it is?”

“It creates a construct out of light,” the child replied immediately. “I…” Her mouth quirked in a frown of disappointment, and oh, that expression was so transparent: _she won’t let me go on until I answer correctly_. “I’m not sure what sort of construct it is.”

“I’m surprised enough that you realized so quickly that it would create a construct.” It was important also to be surprising, sometimes. When someone was caught off-guard, certain things could slip out from behind the mask they made of their face. Seiros summoned an inviting smile to her face, an invitation she hoped would be clear enough: _share your secrets with me, dear child_. “Are you sure you have never seen this spell diagram before?”

Seiros choked back the wave of disappointment that surged up in her throat when the vessel promptly nodded. “I’d remember something like this, Lady Seiros.”

So one would think.

It was only the first push. It was only the _first_ push. There was a second wave to come; then, if need be, a third. It may yet be that something would be shaken loose today. Too early yet to lose heart.

“Hmm. Well, as you have correctly guessed the identity of this spell—“ the child’s eyes lit up again, and that unknown feeling clenched Seiros’s heart again; she took care to dispel it before continuing “—I think you’ve earned a demonstration. Watch closely, child.”

Reason magic had always been Seiros’s strong point over faith magic. Part of that had so much to do with her difficulties retaining anatomical information, but when she thought about it, it was ironic. The ruler of the church, she who enforced the Goddess’s will on this temporal plane, was less skilled with faith magic than she was with reason magic. She who served as Fódlan’s spiritual ruler, she who dictated the paths of the lives of the faithful, had more comfort and expertise with magic designed purely to kill, magic born from arcane knowledge, rather than magic that could be used to heal, magic that drew its strength from faith in the Goddess.

It was inevitable, in the end. Seiros’s hands were made for killing men, not putting them back together. Her hands were made for bringing the recalcitrant to heel, not for the gentle gestures that would convince them of their own will to walk down the true path. No one who truly knew her (and oh, how few did truly know her) would wonder at what carried her down the paths she walked.

( _Mother would have done this all so much better than I—_ )

This spell was an interesting one, for it was a mix of reason and faith. Something that drew on Seiros’s faith, but required no knowledge of anatomy; a welcome reprieve, if she was being perfectly honest. It was… It was rare for her to perform a spell that had no application in battle. It was rare for her to perform a spell that was not meant to kill. Once upon a time, it had not been so rare, but those times were past. Until Mother returned to her, they could not come back again.

It had been a long time, but time was not enough to efface it from her memory, especially not with the diagram so close at hand. Seiros drew power to her fingertips, humming under her breath a single, constant note all the while. (She had always needed it to steady herself. The sisters who had learned alongside her had laughed and teased at her crutch. She felt the absence of their teasing the way a wounded soldier felt the absence of his leg.) She wondered briefly, absurdly, if the child would think the humming was part of the spell, and do it herself. (For a moment, the bell-like specters of her sisters’ laughter was palpable in the gentle warmth of the room, piercing Seiros’s ears as knives.)

Translucent, iridescent butterflies flared from Seiros’s fingertips, dancing about the room on the sunbeams that shivered in the still air. If the child’s eyes had been bright before, now they were ablaze, with that odd spark igniting in full blaze, incandescent and difficult to meet directly. “I can do _that_?” she breathed, her mouth curling in a smile that split her face in two.

Seiros flashed another secretive smile her way. “You certainly may try.”

As she watched the child attempt the spell herself, there was a moment when Seiros forgot herself in the wave of emotions that came with _teaching_. Entirely unintentional it was. Her rage could carry her away with it at times, though she preferred using it as a tool to being used by _it_. With other emotions, it was far easier to keep them in check, enough to use them as intended. Unintentional, it was, and unexpected; the wave came upon her unawares, and she was carried away before she knew what was happening.

Seiros was not much of a teacher. Reinhild had suggested she train some of the more talented recruits into the new knightly order in brawling, but Seiros had never had much patience for bringing others up to her level of expertise with, well, anything. Cichol and Indech had been the natural, even _eager_ , teachers. Seiros had not even liked to spar with others, except when necessity demanded it.

She had never known how _good_ it could feel to share her knowledge with others. Diluted, the knowledge still felt, but she saw someone else delighting in something she had once delighted in (her sisters’ laughter curdled into screams), and oh, Seiros recognized the elation piercing her heart with its true blade. She had never thought she would feel the like again. Her eyes were swimming, suddenly. It was difficult to breathe.

But the moment passed, as it must. This was a test for the vessel, not a moment for Seiros to indulge herself in fantasies of what might have been.

Little butterflies were dancing in the air with the larger ones now. These were weaker, and paler, the mark of a first try, but still, Seiros had had no such success on her first, second, or _third_ attempt when she was learning this spell, and if that wasn’t a sign, she did not know what that was.

“That is remarkable for a first try.” Let the trill of surprise tint her voice; it would make what followed next follow more smoothly. “Are you _certain_ you have never encountered this spell before?” Seiros asked, raising an eyebrow conspiratorially in anticipation of the confession to come.

The vessel searched her face, eyes dimming once more, smile fading from her face. She fidgeted with the skirt of her robes as she insisted, “Really, Lady Seiros, I haven’t. I’m _sure_ I would have remembered if someone had taught me a spell like this.”

Anticipation turned to wormwood in Seiros’s mouth. It was all she could do to send the vessel on her way without taking her by the shoulders and shaking her until she screamed. Which one of them would have been screaming, Seiros was uncertain.

-0-0-0-

It was no secret that disappointment was a bitter pill to swallow. The saying had been an old one by the time Seiros had been born—indeed, she suspected the saying had been around for as long as there had been pills. They saying spoke of a bitter pill to swallow. It had never said a _word_ of how easy it was for disappointment to lodge in your throat and begin to choke.

Every test was met with failure. Every last push Seiros gave was met with stillness, like trying to shove a brick wall bare-handed. Nothing she did could spark remembrance; nothing she did could inspire the vessel to remember the stony heart nestled deep within its cage of flesh and bone. Seiros was met with blank stares, then concerned ones, and Seiros had never felt the sting of condescension prick so severely as when that child _dared_ to look at her like she did not know what was happening, like _Seiros_ was the one who was not making any sense in her behavior.

 _You do not see me_ , she would have screamed, would it not have shattered the mask before every last eager onlooker in the monastery. _You do not see me, you selfish child; you see only an image, you see only the face I put forward to the faithful, you have never seen me as I truly am, how_ dare _you presume that you know what dwells in my heart, how dare you_

Mother’s heart dwelled within that trammel of ignorant flesh. Mother’s heart and Seiros’s own blood were imprisoned within that unfeeling cage. Seiros must have forbearance for that reason, if no other. She was surrounded by the fickle and the two-faced, those who would have gladly pillaged her body for every last drop of blood, every last splinter of bone, had they known the truth. That was reason enough not to let the mask slip, even without taking into account that nagging fear that if any ill befell the ignorant vessel, Mother’s sleeping heart would _know_.

So she held her mask and she held her tongue, and watched the vessel go about her life, insensible of what she held captive in her heart. Watched her mother’s jailer go about her life freely, in all innocence of just what it was she did to the one who’d given her life by remaining stubbornly ignorant of her true nature.

 _What if she runs away_?

Now that it sat within an unfeeling breast, Mother’s heart was more vulnerable than it had been since Seiros had retrieved the _sword_ from the morass of mud and blood that was Tailtean. If the vessel got it into her head that she wanted to live outside of Garreg Mach, she could be gone in the blink of an eye, carrying Mother’s heart out of reach with her. Mother’s heart could just _vanish_ , become lost to Seiros forever. The very idea felt like dying; without any hope of reunion, without any hope of feeling her mother’s love again, she felt as if her soul would wither into nothingness, as a plant withered away when denied sun and water.

 _I will keep her here_. The nuns swore vows of lifetime service to Garreg Mach; they could leave the grounds only with Seiros’s permission, and the penance for violating this edict was a severe one. The vessel would be old enough to swear these vows within a few years. Seiros would make certain that she did. However long it took to awaken Mother from her deep slumber, Seiros would ensure that she was here when she did it.

If she ever awoke.

If she ever remembered.

Perhaps she would just live out the vessel’s lifespan, however long that might be, sleeping within, and let the vessel mock Seiros with her utter ignorance.

Just…

Why?

Why did any of this have to happen in the first place?

“It was human greed,” Seiros muttered tonelessly as she knelt before the empty throne. The chill of the floor seeped through her skirt, turning her legs to lumps of lead. She had lost feeling in her feet some time ago. It was, at best, a distant consideration. “That much is obvious. They are a vain, grasping folk; you would shudder at some of the demands they make of me. I have spent so many years living among them, and truly, there is no end to their avarice. They would swallow the world whole in their mouths if only it would fit, and then they would move on to devour all the stars in the sky, without ever sparing thought to what their avarice cost.” She swallowed hard, rubbing at her upper arm and taking some comfort in the sparks of pain that flared along the paths traced by her fingernails. “But still…”

“I do not understand how they could have learned the secret of our blood.” Her eyes rested on the empty throne that sat high and tall and proud on the dais above her, though empty, its pride was noticeably diminished. (What was the point of a chair, when its owner was gone?) “Was it the rewards Indech gave to those who passed his trials?” From the throne, there was only silence. Seiros’s voice rose, pitching higher. “But even if that was what gave them the idea, I still do not know how they could have learned of our Crest stones, let alone what could be done with our bones.” Seiros’s stomach lurched, as her mind was drawn irresistibly to the poisoned point of thinking of her body and thinking of _power_ and _harvesting_. Would she never be free of this? “ _I_ did not know what would be done with our bones, not until…”

The Crest of Flames. Mother had taken fire’s destructive power, and turned it into a wellspring of life, the seed of prosperity and enlightenment. And then her body had been ripped apart and her spine had been stolen and fashioned into a sword by a monster who only understood fire as a weapon used to kill. Oh, how the world could turn on its head so, so violently, and then never turn upright again.

“We did not know what could be done with our bones.” Sometimes, Seiros wondered what could be done with human bones, wondered how _they_ would like it if they had to watch their brothers and sisters hunted and butchered and their bones shaped into staves and shields and bows and axes and lances and _swords_ , and then turned against them. But human bones contained no such power. They could do nothing but steal it from others. “We did not know; I do not ken how they could ever have learned the secret themselves.” Seiros swallowed a scream, that then thrust its jagged edges into her voice as she demanded, “Why did _any_ of this have to happen?!”

Echoes reigned in the crypt for what felt like an eternity afterwards, Seiros’s increasingly mangled voice reflecting her words back to her in increasingly childish tones.

You did not make demands of Mother.

You did not make demands of the Goddess.

When the echoes were gone, there was left naught but silence.

Oh, how damning that silence was.

“Please,” Seiros whispered, staring fervently at the empty throne. “Please, Mother, I heard your voice here once before. I know that I did.” It had been as clear as a memory. “I remember what you told me. I have avenged you, and all your fallen children. I have extracted their penance from them, and will continue doing so for however long it takes to draw out proper remorse. Please, I have done all that you have asked of me.”

The throne did not answer her. Cold stone could answer no one.

Seiros sucked a deep breath. Her lungs still screamed for air. “I will continue to do as you have asked. I will do what you would have done, were you here, the best that I can.” _Crude and corrupt compared to how she would have done it._ “And I will safeguard your vessel.” Seiros managed a weak smile. “For love of what she bears within, I will forgive her her ignorance. I will do as you have asked of me, for the land you loved so dearly.”

-0-0-0-

Wilhelm had once compared bandits to cockroaches. Where you saw one, you could expect to find at least a dozen more lurking in the shadows, waiting for you to pass them by so they could come back out and resume despoiling everything within reach.

At the time, he had been referring to the Almyran raiders who liked to take advantage of the chaos wreaked by Nemesis and his henchmen to ride over the eastern border, carry off everything they could find that wasn’t nailed down (as well as some things that _were_ ), and then ride back over the eastern border with their ill-gotten gains. Wilhelm had made the cockroach comparison _quite_ often, though given how unfond he was of insects, it wasn’t that much of a shock.

These days, it wasn’t the Almyrans inviting that comparison. The Almyrans had a new king who was thoroughly uninterested in the idea of _any_ raiding parties crossing the border without his express permission, and though there were still rumblings regarding the shape of the border, there had been no further violence from that quarter.

No, the problem had been fomented within.

Seiros had long believed Nemesis’s malice to live on in the hearts of man. The more bandits creeped out of the shadows to attack travelers in the daylight, the more villages in the north burned, the more adamant she was as to the truth of this belief. You kill one bandit, and ten more crawl out of the dark and the muck to take their place. Even riders from Enbarr making the journey to Garreg Mach had been harried on the road. There was no end to their numbers, nor their brazenness.

Well, if they would not abide by the Goddess’s order, she who enforced that order must needs do something about it.

Seiros’s order of knights was not yet as large as she hoped it someday would be. However, they were the cream of the crop, both in faithfulness and martial prowess, and many of them skilled commanders on top of that. They could lead soldiers. They could track bandits to their lairs. And they could carry out executions as well as anyone who had ever fought under Seiros’s command.

These past few months, the knights had been kept constantly busy burning out the bandits’ nests. There had been one or two occasions when lawful villages had become involved by sheer proximity, but those incidents were few and far between, and they were a small price to pay against ensuring order for Fódlan. The majority of the law-abiding had been well out of the line of fire, and no doubt they were grateful just to be able to go to sleep at night without having to fear waking up to the sound of a robber breaking into their house.

It would take some time to be rid of the rest of them. Where you killed one bandit, ten more rose up to take his place—it would take some time. But Seiros knew they would eradicate them eventually. Either they would all die out before they had the chance to spawn more like them, or prospective bandits would see what it was to draw the wrath of the church, and slink back into the shadows where they belonged. All it would take was patience, and judicious eradication.

Whether a difference would be made in time for the shipments of food to last them through the winter months would arrive, now that was another matter. One Seiros hoped would be solved soon.

“Your Grace?” A young page appeared at the door to Seiros’s office, holding himself with a solemnity that would have looked ill-fitting on a man of middle years, let alone a boy who could not be older than eight. “You asked for someone to tell you when Sir Ranulf was sighted coming back?”

Seiros nodded briskly, rising to her feet. A report would certainly be nice. “When is he expected to reach the gates?”

“In about an hour, your Grace.”

“Very well. Inform the gatekeeper of my arrival.”

As Seiros began the journey (she had heard enough complaints about the length of the walk to get from one point to any other point to match all the stars in the sky), she attracted a small entourage, as she often did when traversing the monastery grounds. No longer surprising, though there were occasions when she would have wished for more privacy than she was given. It would not be difficult to bear on this day; the information was not so sensitive that it could not be heard but by her ears alone.

In the dazzling sunlight of the Horsebow Moon, it was impossible for Seiros not to notice that her party had been joined by the vessel. Fifteen years she was now, and nearly as tall as Seiros herself, the resemblance between their features uncanny enough that it had drawn remark from those with wagging tongues (And those wagging tongues had seen the wisdom of staying locked inside their mouths soon enough). The vessel tried to catch Seiros’s eye as they walked, to which Seiros responded by carefully avoiding her gaze. This was the best way to deal with the vessel, these days, the best way for Seiros to deal with her without having to fight the urge to scream the whole time she was in her presence. She was calmest when she treated the vessel as a ghost on the edge of her vision, a phantasm that would vanish when light was extinguished. Where her siblings’ ghosts would have been reached for, this one was best disregarded.

Seiros had sent Sir Ranulf out with a small force to scout the Oghma Mountains to the north of Garreg Mach two weeks prior. There were rumors of a large encampment of bandits somewhere in that area, and if such was determined to be the case, Sir Ranulf knew his orders: they could suffer none of them to live. So close to the monastery, none of them could be suffered to live, even the one that would carry messages of the slaughter to the rest of their companions. Seiros would be interested to see if he had found any such encampment, after all. If the answer turned out to be ‘yes,’ she would have to arrange for watchtowers of some sort to be set out in the areas surrounding Garreg Mach. Increasing patrols on the roads to and from the monastery might make some sort of impact, as well.

 _I may have to lead a force against them myself, if we find other nests too close to Garreg Mach. I think that would send a clearer message than a battle led by any of the knights. And…_ She smiled grimly. _And I think I would like to make an example myself. It has been too long since I last had occasion to do so._

They passed under the deep shadows cast by the inner gates, the gatekeeper saluting as they passed him by. Sir Ranulf had yet to meet them, so Seiros would make the trip down the hillside to the outer gates at the border of the town. It had been some time since the land around the narrow, winding path was attended to, and the slices of countryside trammeled in by high stone walls bristled with yew trees and blackthorn and thistles and gorse. At points, the path became so hemmed in by the bristling branches of the yew trees that the party was forced to walk single file.

“We ought to do something about this,” Seiros heard one of her entourage mutter.

“Aye, agreed,” another muttered back. “By this time next year, we may need a machete just to get to town to buy pepper off of the southern traders.”

Seiros found it easier to ignore the conversation than to try to suggest some solution. The only thing she could think of was burning, but immediately, the risk to the monastery made her balk. It should not have been let along so long. The land was too rocky for farming, the soil too thin, but she would concede that it should not have been allowed to become barely-contained wilderness, either.

There was an odd, almost nostalgic beauty to it, though. The beauty of life unbounded (at least until the walls became involved), the beauty of wild and lonely places, Mother’s gift to the land allowed to reach its full potential. She had not made all the land to be fertile farmland, after all. She’d not made all the land to be cut open for mines, or gouged to make cities. Some of it was made to be wilderness. Some of it was made to be as difficult for humans (or Nabateans, but there were precious few of those left to think of the world in such a fashion) to live in as possible, and it was just as beautiful as anything else that Mother’s power had shaped.

Shards of the blue sky glittered behind a frame of gaunt and grasping branches. Seiros was regarding it, something almost like peace weaving its gentle song into her heart, when a commotion erupted behind her.

There was…

At that moment, Seiros’s memories of the incident became fragmented. Years and decades later, she would still struggle to piece it together correctly—rarely was she caught so thoroughly off-guard.

There was shouting, and crying. (Had the crying come before, or after? It had not been her voice crying; she was certain of that much, at least. She had been utterly without voice.) There was a cacophony of sounds that, the more times Seiros remembered the incident, the less they sounded like voices at all, and the more they became pure, discordant noise.

There was a man who had appeared suddenly in the small party. Seiros could not remember his face, or the color of his hair, or what sort of clothes he had been garbed in. The moment she saw him, her gaze fixated on the sun flashing off of the blade of his sword. (It was pocked with rust. That was what she remembered so clearly about everything from the time when her memories were jumbled: the blade was speckled with rust, a killing beast slowly sliding towards the grave.)

“Lady Seiros!”

And then everything came back into too-sharp, too-bright focus. A body impacting against hers, but no pain: pain was for the one who had stepped between herself and the blade.

Copper filled the air.

A hand clutched her skirt as the body sank slowly, so slowly, to the ground.

A wave of blood lapped gently against her feet, as the body crumpled on the ground before her took a few last labored breaths, blood bubbling in her mouth, blue-green eyes staring at nothing while the spark in them that had been like nothing Rhea had seen slowly dimmed, then was finally snuffed out.

-0-0-0-

They… They hadn’t caught the assassin, not yet. Someone had run ahead to warn the keeper of the outer gate to shut it against anyone attempting to leave the monastery grounds, so it would only be a matter of time before the assassin was flushed out, but as of yet, he had vanished into the tangle of yew and blackthorn and thistle and gorse, and even the search dogs had difficulty making headway against the dense undergrowth. It had only been twelve hours. Seiros would not be surprised if they found the man by morning, trying to scale a wall or steal food from a vendor in the marketplace. When they found him, they were to bring him to her. As with anyone who dared raise their blade against one who served the Goddess, she wanted to deal with him _personally_.

Eirian was… Eirian was…

No one asked too many questions, when Seiros made the request (she had tried to make it an order, but when the time came, her voice faltered, and she could not find the strength for authority) that Eirian’s body be turned over to her. The fact that there had been so many wagging tongues regarding the uncanny resemblance between the two of them had worked in her favor, in this case, as had her former closeness with this child. No one asked too many questions. No one thought it unnatural. No one asked where Seiros was taking the body.

Laid out on a bier in the cold, dim crypt, her hair spilling over the edge like water, her face still and marbled, dressed in clean robes, Eirian looked almost as if she was sleeping. She had been prepared for burial before Seiros had come to collect her, and her body had been cleaned in death likely more thoroughly than it had ever been in death. Just looking at her, Seiros could not imagine that twelve hours ago, there had been a sword protruding from her belly, could not imagine that gurgled blood had dribbled down her chin, could not visualize the sweat that had broken out across her brow for the few moments she was still able to feel pain. It was all utterly unreal.

_How dare he…_

Seiros’s mind was transported, as it often was, to the past. To the weary quiet after the close of the battle that had saved Fódlan. To Cichol, kneeling in the mud, sobbing hysterically, and to Cethleann, small and bloody and motionless in his arms. She had felt… What had she felt? All memory of her emotions at the sight of her niece near death faded into the gray fog with so much else. She could _imagine_ what she had felt, but it would have been but a facsimile of the real thing. It paid insult to the actual experience.

When she looked at Eirian, that was all she could see, and she did not know why. In her breast their dwelled a sensation that was not emotionlessness; it was far too weighty for that. It was numbness, an opiate against something that she suspected that, had it been able to express itself fully, would have screamed.

Here, she was surrounded by the shadows of death. The mangled remains of her brothers and sisters were housed here. She had found what remained of her mother’s corpse, here. The crypt would gain one more occupant today, for Seiros could risk none discovering the secrets of Eirian’s body—had she been more mindful, she would not have allowed anyone to clean or dress the child’s body at all.

Seiros stared down at the unmoving form before her, at the pale, still face. Not peaceful, just blank, the terrible emptiness of death.

Her legs wobbled. Her mouth ran dry. Her hands clenched on the edge of the bier, and her heart hammered sickly-fast in her breast.

Then, she mastered herself. She parted the front of Eirian’s robes, and then her hand went to her belt.

With this dagger, she had slain Nemesis. So many uses had this dagger. Today, it would find one more.

Flesh and blood squelched almost deafeningly loudly as Seiros plunged her dagger into the cool flesh of the corpse over and over again. Blood flowed over the blade and over her hands as if still fresh, sticky and coppery, and almost slimy, though when Seiros paused to dwell on that last sensation, it had vanished, and she told herself she must have imagined it. Her hand slipped on the dagger and cut open on the blade, but oh, well, it was all Seiros’s blood in the end, wasn’t it? There could be no harm in the mingling, when it all came from her own body.

Finally, the point of the dagger hit something hard, something Seiros knew was not a rib or the collarbone or breastbone, and she cast her dagger away. She wouldn’t need it anymore. She sank her hands into the hole she had carved in flesh more pliant than she would have thought, for twelve hours dead, and began to dig.

Flesh caked under her fingernails, and the less said of the smell that permeated the air around the bier, the better. The Crest stone was lodged deep within the heart of flesh, layers of muscle wrapped tight around it, and Seiros gritted her teeth as she pulled and pulled and pulled.

The Crest stone came out with a wet, tearing noise, still wrapped all over with dripping pink sinew, the faintly glowing pattern of the Crest of Flames barely visible beneath. Seiros nodded to herself, pausing to take a breath before she retrieved her dagger, and began to scrape the Crest stone clean.

Eirian had been a failure, unfit to house the consciousness of the progenitor god. Next time, things would be different.


End file.
